It all makes matters worse when consumers look south of the border. Ask just about anyone on the street, and they'll tell you that we pay more for gas than Americans do. And they want to know why.
But Imperial Oil says Canadians have it wrong.
Frank Pickard says it's "absolutely not" true that Canadians pay more for gas than their southern counterparts. "The tax structure in Canada and the US is very different. So when Canadians go down to Florida for the summer they see much lower prices and they presume that that's got something to do with the oil industry. Absolutely not."
He says taxes are the key to the price difference.
Marketplace surveyed 10 cities in Canada and 10 cities in the United States. We converted all prices to Canadian cents per litre. Here's what we found:
* The lowest price at the pump in the US was 29.9 cents a litre in Atlanta.
* The lowest price at the pump in Canada was 56.9 cents a litre in Calgary - 27 cents higher.
But remember, according to Pickard and the oil companies, taxes are the key, so let's take taxes out.
Minus the tax there is still a big difference:
* The lowest price in the United States, taxes out, was 18.4 cents per litre, again in Atlanta.
* The lowest price in Canada, taxes out, was 30.3 cents a litre in Ottawa.
Here is the survey data.
www.cbc.ca...
Again, our comparisons are with taxes taken out, in Canadian cents per litre.
In our survey, Marketplace found that in seven of the 10 U.S. cities, you could get gas cheaper than in any of the Canadian cities.
We also saw a much wider spread between the highest price and the lowest price available: In Canada, nine of the 10 cities had a price spread of less than four cents a litre, with as little as 0.9 cents a litre.
In the U.S., seven of the 10 cities had a spread of more than 10 cents a litre, up to as much as 20.9 cents.
In Ontario, for instance, Imperial Oil, Petro-Canada and Sunoco control 85 percent of the refining market.
In Quebec, Ultramar, Petro-Canada and Shell control all of it.
But in a competitive market like Texas the picture is quite different: Exxon, Amoco and Mobil control only 29 per cent of refining.
This is an excellent set of pages, especially for Canadians.
www.cbc.ca...
